How I could Build an Online Shop with AI this Weekend

A lot of different posts on LinkedIn are about the next-cutting edge technology with AI. Which is great, but for most people you don't need to have the next gen technology to make some money.

Drop-shipping has existed for a long time, and with AI tools, anyone could launch a successful online store over a weekend. I'm going to show you how I would build a coffee mug business using AI, showcasing how easy it is to design, market, and sell your products online.

Tools We'll be using

• Answer the Public - Great for Keyword researching based on traffic. You don't need more than the free version to do this.
• ChatGPT - Let's keep it to what millions of people are already using.
• Printful - It's a printing site that I've used for ecommerce clients in the past. Payment comes from a purchase, making it essentially free for you.
• Midjourney or Flux - Any art tool works for this. Use what you are comfortable with.
• Tally - My secret weapon for surveys. It's like typeform and the others, but it's much much cheaper and has everything you need on the free version.

Step 1 - Find Who to Sell to

The first step in building a successful e-commerce business is finding the right audience. Since I'm coming from the marketing lens, I want to understand who they are, what they are like, and what problems they would want to solve with my product.

It might be funny to think of t-shirts, or mugs as a problem, since we hopefully wear clothes every day. Have you thought as to why we choose a certain t-shirt over another? That's a problem I want to identify with my target audience, so I can cater to that.

I'm going to create a mug business for Marketing and AI. It's topical, and it could be a fun gag gift to give to marketers. If you're doing t-shirts or something else, you can definitely search for popular topics with Google search results, and see keyword popularity with Answer the Public.

Since this is a low-stakes project, let's test out the ideas.

Step 2 - Creating your Product

Before we test out our ideas, we need to create the ideas first. This is where an art program like MidJourney could come into play. I would recommend doing this on your own private MidJourney server, so you can better save designs and not necessarily spam others.

But let's say you got your private MidJourney server set up already. We're going to want to create some prompts to create some ideas based on the research we did already.

You can use ChatGPT to create designs for yourself, but I would also recommend that you follow our guides on how to create a Midjourney design. For example, if I wanted to create an image for an eco-friendly product design, I'd do this prompt:

Sustainable Design Midjourney Prompt | 4Fsh

Create a eco-friendly product packaging with our Midjourney Prompt

4FshJames Parker

It's easy right? Come up with a few different designs to test things out. Let's make a business robot for our mugs.

Step 3 - Testing it Out

Let's test out what idea works best. I'm going to be checking my assumptions and see if they work or not. I'd throw out a survey made with Tally to my social network, or ask on Reddit or some other platform. I can post different design options to see what people think about the design.

The reason I also love Tally is because we can take this a step further with putting the products on the survey to sell it. Something something "check out these products, and let us know what you (think / consider / like)?" or something further into a path.

Say we got positive feedback over one of the styles. We'll go back to step 2 and design more in that style and come up with a few more different ideas. But let's move on to the next step of setting up the online shop

Step 4 - Creating your Shop

Printful is great for getting your idea out and going. If you're not familiar with drop-shipping, it's basically you don't keep inventory. Instead, someone places an order, and the company you are working with ships the ordered design over to them. So in our case, Printful handles everything from printing to shipping, allowing us to focus on things like marketing and growing the business.

I'm going to put my design on a t-shirt and generate some mockups so people can see how it looks. Kind of like the following image. Do this for a few of your images, and see what works best for you.

Step 5 - Marketing

You created your store and your products, and you've tested things out. It's time to get the word out and start attracting customers. Effective marketing is really important to driving sales and building your brand. One of the best ways is to make engaging content on social media - and guess what, you can use AI for this too.

Now we can use ChatGPT for this to create compelling posts for people to click on. We can use MidJourney to take pictures we have of ourselves and replace the image on the shirt with the design. Or we can use tools like CapCut to add our images to videos to show how it could look live.

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Don't create a ton of shirts and just spam your audience though. Keep it limited and use a scarcity tactic to drive sales, as customers are more likely to purchase if they think they might miss out.

Another strategy is using social proof. If you got the money for it, give your product away for free in exchange for testimonials or reviews on your site. Positive feedback from real customers will significantly boost your brand's credibility, and attract more buyers.

Step 6 - Rinse and Repeat

Let's say you know what your customers want. You got a few sales already, and you have a better understanding of your customer's needs and wants. Let's go back to step 1, and go deeper down that rabbit hole. You can use AI with customer surveys to analyze sentiment, and figure out how to further improve your products. You can maybe introduce more designs and market them further.

Or you can set up a pipeline to automate all this and create a potential passive income stream.

Building an online business with the help of AI is more accessible now than what it was before. By finding your target audience, researching them, creating unique designs, setting up a shop and marketing your product, you can easily create a successful and sustainable business. AI tools make each of these steps more manageable, and allow you to focus on the creativity and customer experience. Or your normal job. Not bad for a weekend project right?